Day 19 — Traffic and the Maximum Edge Concept

Although traffic is just one variable in the equation to create a successful business online, it is an important one. Assuming that everything is the same, the more traffic you have, the more business you get.

Ed Dale and the team are doing a great job in discovering a way to test a niche with natural search engine — which means anyone can spend zero dollar if they don’t want to spend money — to jump start a business.

Although the system itself is not perfect, it is rare nowadays to build a business without any investment, especially with a strategy that involves organic search engine.

Often in the process, you will be able to rank well in as little as 24 hours, although normally it takes one to two weeks. There’s no guarantee, because this is just a test, but still very achievable.

Diversifying Traffic Sources with Pay Per Click

Sometimes it is impossible to get enough traffic to do a valid test. People who are willing to spend a few dollars to test may speed up the process tremendously.

Google AdWords, the biggest pay per click advertising, requires you to pay but it is not as hard as other advertising medium to get right. You may get a click for as low as $0.05 or $0.10.

If you already have a working web site that turns visitors into customers, you know your numbers well enough to invest on many other advertising medium and get a positive return on investment.

Even if you do not plan to spend money to get traffic right now, when your business grows, you will need to. For that regard, AdWords can be a great strategy for natural search.

For keywords that you fail to rank well on the organic listing, you may still get traffic from people searching those keywords by getting a spot on sponsored listing.

Maximum Edge Concept

If you follow the challenge so far, you should now grasp quite a bit of the Maximum Edge methodology. It tries to get the best of both worlds, the speed of pay per click without paying.

Of course, nothing can beats AdWords in speed, where you can start getting traffic in less than 30 minutes. However, to test a niche, Maximum Edge offers a solid method to start.

The underlying principle is to spend little to no money and test out if a keyword is worth it. Because it is easy to test, you can test various keywords in the same niche. That’s a good concept, although I am a bit concerned about the feasibility as a long term business if you limit yourself to a narrow keyword from the start.

If Thirty Day Challenge has different perspective of building business online as mine, that’s fine, there is more than one way to do it. And I still like what they do. They offer solid research and testing method.

In my humble opinion, for the long run, it is to build a business around a niche and grow it instead of jumping from one niche, make $100 per site, and move on to another. I don’t know if they actually encourage this because it is not yet obvious but if you are going for the long run, a broader keyword is often necessary. Read my post on Day 18 – the decision day to get what I mean.

“Business is business is business.”

As Ed repeatedly pointed out, it is about testing though so you will build out once you stumble upon a niche that is profitable. At the end of the day, it is still about building resourceful site that is helpful to the prospects and customers.

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